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‘To what?’ Ryan slammed the ball back into her court with effortless ease. ‘Freeman was right. Without any outside pressure, my memory’s coming back…just a bit more slowly than he predicted. I don’t want to mess with the process. Maybe I was travelling light for a reason—the same reason I was only carrying a few dollars. Maybe I’m in some sort of trouble. I don’t want to go back to a life I don’t remember. I’d be too vulnerable. Surely you can identify with that.’
Nina’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly.
‘He’s got you there, girl,’ Ray said slyly.
It was on the tip of her tongue to say that a man with two platinum credit cards would never be as vulnerable as a roving artist with scarcely an asset to her name. But something held her back.
‘For goodness’ sake, it’s ridiculous!’ she said hotly. ‘What makes you think he’ll be any good at doing repairs? I doubt if he even knows which end of a hammer is which.’
Ryan’s head tilted, his hair gleaming blue-black in the sun. ‘What makes you say that?’
She spun around and grabbed up his hands, turning them over to display the palms. ‘Well, look! You’re obviously not used to manual labour. No-one who works with tools has hands this soft,’ she jeered, drawing her fingers across his smooth skin. ‘And your fingernails have been manicured.’
He looked down at her, standing between his splayed knees, a willing captive to her strong artist’s grip. ‘I thought women liked a man to have nice hands,’ he murmured smokily. ‘You have such silken skin yourselves it seems a shame to risk damaging it with rough handling.’
Nina snatched her fingers away. It had been a big mistake to touch him. He might have lost his memory, but he hadn’t lost his instinctive ability to flirt or the basic sensuality of his nature.
Even when they had been snapping and snarling at each other over their respective siblings, Ryan had somehow managed to inject an element of sexual provocation into their encounters. To her horror, Nina had started to feel a kick of guilty excitement every time she saw him and had secretly thrilled to the smouldering blue fire that had flared in his eyes whenever she scored a point in one of their close verbal jousts.
Unlike her, Ryan had not attempted to hide the fact that he was aroused by her spirited opposition to his entrenched ideas. His girlfriend of the time had been a gorgeous, slinky blond creature who Nina had cattily decided looked as if she had never opposed an idea from a man in her life!
‘Maybe you’re a hairdresser. They always have soft, pampered hands,’ she suggested evilly.
To her dismay, he took that as an invitation to cup her slender neck, his thumbs resting in the sensitive spot just below her ears, and combed his fingers experimentally up through the hair at the nape of her neck.
‘I must admit, doing this does feel familiar,’ he mused, openly goading. ‘Perhaps if you let me wash it for you tonight, it might give me a better clue.’
Since Nina always washed her hair in the shower, the suggestion made her flinch. She hurriedly stepped back out of reach, an irresistible vision arising in her mind of Ryan standing behind her under the flow of water, slowly massaging her soapy scalp.
Her lashes flicked up and she was mortified to find him studying her hot cheeks with knowing eyes. ‘Inspiring thoughts?’ he asked blandly.
She remembered how clever he was with words. His technique for vanquishing Karl had included treating the younger man with an unpredictable mixture of polite condescension and thinly veiled contempt, deliberately goading him into outbursts of temper that only succeeded in making him sound like a petulant boy.
‘I don’t need a qualified master builder to do the job,’ Ray was saying testily. ‘I’m only a fisherman and I still managed to build most of this place myself. Acourse, it took a good few years….’
‘That’s not really the point,’ she told him, attempting to outstare her tormentor as she directed another question at him. ‘What if someone’s already worried about you? What about your family?’ she challenged.
His parents had lived somewhere in Europe, but what about Katy? Had she graduated with her commerce degree and gone on to postgraduate study at Harvard as Ryan had originally planned?
